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| O marxismo não é uma doutrina — até mesmo Karl Marx disse: "Eu não sou marxista". Em vez disso, trata-se de um conjunto de proposições e hipóteses sobre como o mundo realmente funciona, as quais qualquer pessoa que deseje mudá-lo deveria adotar. (Manfred Brückels / CC BY-SA 3.0) |
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Melissa Naschek
É famosa a declaração de Karl Marx de que ele não era marxista. No entanto, sua obra teórica deu origem a diversas vertentes de pesquisa, movimentos políticos e debates acalorados. Seria possível identificar um conjunto de ideias unificadoras que constituem o marxismo?
Neste episódio mais recente do podcast Confronting Capitalism, da Jacobin Radio, Vivek Chibber e Melissa Naschek examinam os fundamentos da obra de Marx e explicam como o marxismo se desenvolveu — e também se degenerou — ao longo do último século.
O programa Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber é produzido pela Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy e publicado pela Jacobin. Você pode ouvir o episódio completo aqui.
Em nosso podcast e em seus trabalhos acadêmicos, você apresenta consistentemente uma perspectiva marxista sobre política, teoria e economia, mas, às vezes, também critica aspectos do marxismo. Em que sentido você se considera marxista?
Vivek Chibber
O marxismo é uma teoria social sobre como o mundo funciona, e é a teoria que tem sido utilizada e mobilizada pelo movimento socialista. Portanto, do ponto de vista analítico, socialismo e marxismo são coisas diferentes.
Isso significa que, tecnicamente — como disse certa vez o marxista austríaco Rudolf Hilferding —, é possível reconhecer a força teórica do marxismo independentemente do seu alinhamento político; você pode considerar o marxismo a teoria mais adequada e esclarecedora sem ser socialista, pois são coisas distintas. Mas, na minha visão, essa não é a melhor maneira de compreender essa relação. A forma como eu colocaria a questão é que os marxistas são um tipo específico de socialista.
É tecnicamente verdade que alguém pode ser de direita e afirmar que o marxismo é a teoria que melhor explica o mundo, decidindo, então, utilizá-lo para tentar estabilizar o capitalismo.
Fala-se muito sobre como figuras como Steve Bannon são influenciadas pelo marxismo.
Vivek Chibber
Isso é tecnicamente verdade, mas acredito que contraria o espírito do que o marxismo deve ser: a teoria que ajuda a esclarecer e orientar o movimento socialista.
Socialistas são aqueles que aderem a uma certa compreensão de como o capitalismo funciona, de como a história evoluiu e de quais são as condições que podem permitir uma sociedade mais humana e mais justa — aquilo que chamamos de socialismo.
O marxismo pode estar certo ou errado. Você pode ser socialista e dizer: "Bem, acho que o marxismo está, na verdade, majoritariamente equivocado". E também pode ser um socialista que adere a ele. A razão pela qual ainda aderi ao marxismo é que me considero socialista. Além disso, acredito que, quaisquer que sejam suas falhas, o marxismo continua sendo a teoria mais esclarecedora e útil para promover um projeto amplamente social-democrata e socialista.
Então, quais ideias estão no cerne do marxismo?
Vivek Chibber
Essa é uma pergunta interessante, porque nunca houve consenso sobre isso. Percebo que, nas redes sociais, existe uma convicção enorme de que existe algo chamado "marxismo" — algo que teria estas quatro leis ou aqueles cinco componentes — e que ou você é marxista, ou não é. Mas, sempre que se tenta definir o marxismo dessa maneira restrita, facilmente encontramos pessoas universalmente reconhecidas como parte do panteão marxista que, no entanto, não aderem a um ou outro dos princípios tidos como essenciais à teoria marxista. Portanto, não é uma pergunta fácil de responder: o que está, afinal, no cerne do marxismo?
Alguns poderiam apontar a teoria do valor-trabalho; os mais ambiciosos e pretensiosos talvez citassem a dialética ou algo do gênero. Contudo, em qualquer momento da história do marxismo, se observássemos as figuras de vanguarda da política socialista que se autodenominam marxistas, encontraríamos profundas divergências sobre questões que poderíamos considerar essenciais ao marxismo — seja a teoria do valor, a filosofia, ou mesmo o materialismo, entre outras coisas. Assim, não é uma pergunta simples. Mas também não quero me esquivar dela.
Vou fazer você responder a essa pergunta.
Vivek Chibber
Justo. Antes de mais nada, o marxismo não é uma doutrina. Ao contrário da Bíblia ou de uma religião, ele não possui dogmas centrais que precisem ser obrigatoriamente seguidos e que tenham sido definidos por uma autoridade central.
Na verdade, a autoridade central do marxismo era Karl Marx; quando ele viu a maneira como sua teoria estava sendo mobilizada e apresentada por outras pessoas, disse a famosa frase, já no fim da vida: "Tudo o que sei é que não sou marxista". E o que ele queria dizer com isso era que a teoria nunca teve a intenção de ser uma doutrina.
O marxismo é o que se chama de programa de pesquisa — um conjunto de proposições e hipóteses sobre o funcionamento do mundo que devem ser avaliadas com base em seus próprios méritos epistemológicos; isto é, se as evidências as sustentam ou não. Portanto, tentar cristalizá-lo em uma doutrina é uma insensatez.
Ao mesmo tempo, não se quer que ele seja tão abrangente ou vasto a ponto de tudo valer — de qualquer coisa poder ser considerada marxismo. Assim, a meu ver, busca-se uma definição de marxismo que o torne identificável, que lhe confira um núcleo, uma essência, mas que também permita divergências e debates suficientes em seu interior, para que não se perca todo o tempo excomungando pessoas por saírem da ortodoxia.
Então, vejamos o que Marx tentava fazer ao desenvolver sua teoria.
O que ele buscava demonstrar era que a raiz da injustiça neste mundo — a qual nos motiva a tentar construir um mundo melhor — residia na própria estrutura da sociedade moderna. E essa estrutura, segundo Marx, era a estrutura de classes. A ideia era que a estrutura de classes gera um conjunto de restrições e impõe uma série de compulsões às pessoas, levando-as a agir de determinadas maneiras — maneiras que tornam impossível uma ordem social humana e justa. E, como essa ordem é impossível, é preciso mudar a estrutura social e colocar em seu lugar uma nova que, no mínimo, crie a possibilidade de tipos de relações sociais, instituições e comportamentos compatíveis com o florescimento humano.
One of the ideas that really struck me the first time I read Capital, Volume I was when Marx talks about how the capitalist is just the personification of capitalism. And his point is that this isn’t a system that’s just propelled by these individual actors with their own intentions, it’s propelled by actors who fulfill a role in a social order. And so it’s the social order itself that needs to be examined, understood, and attacked, and not just these individuals. That is a really profound idea.
Vivek Chibber
Very true. Socialists and Marxists are very comfortable with the proposition that workers are trapped in their situation, that they’re forced to go out and sell their labor power every day because they have no choice. That’s absolutely true. But Marx was also making a deeper point, which is that capitalists are also trapped in their situation, which is that they have to compete on the market, and they have to try to compel excess labor out of their employees in order to make a profit.
So to Marx, capitalists are no less prisoner to the market than workers are. And that’s profound because it means you cannot make capitalism better by asking capitalists to be better. If they’re going to remain capitalists, they’re going to have to do what they do. In order to change the way in which work is carried out, the way in which people make their living, you have to actually change the compulsions and the constraints on people who are capitalists, which are class constraints and class compulsions.
Melissa Naschek
Right. And when we would talk about this idea of social forces being primarily responsible above and beyond individuals, people would push back and say, “Well, Jeff Bezos, for example, is evil.” And I would try to explain that maybe he is, but maybe he isn’t. It’s actually irrelevant.
Vivek Chibber
Susan Neiman just recently made the argument that socialists should use the word evil. I don’t actually agree with that. But if you want to, fine. Evil, I don’t think it’s a moral term. I think it’s a religious term. Socialists should be moral, and they have to be morally motivated. And you can say Bezos is evil, but he’s not doing what he does simply because he’s evil. If you knocked Jeff Bezos off the pedestal and you put somebody else in his place, they would do more or less the same things, because that’s what it takes to succeed in the sector of business that he’s occupying.
Ao ver a maneira como sua teoria estava sendo mobilizada, Karl Marx proferiu a famosa frase, já no final da vida: "Tudo o que sei é que não sou marxista".
So the first component of Marxism, its main foundation is that the class structure of capitalism is what gives it what Marx called its “laws of motion,” its macro-dynamics. What makes the class structure go is that one group of people isn’t just richer than another group of people, but that it gets its income and wealth from exploiting those other people.
A lot of other theories use the word “class,” but in those theories class is typically associated with income. There are rich people who are in one class, poor people who are underneath them in the other class, and then there’s these people in the middle, and you can identify them by income breaks.
Melissa Naschek
Right. Some of these theories equate class to a sort of cultural status, as a set of — you know, living in a certain place . . .
Vivek Chibber
Tastes.
Melissa Naschek
Yes, exactly.
Vivek Chibber
But for Marx, what differentiated classes was not the level of income earned but what people had to do to acquire their income. So the second component is that class happens when one group of people exploits the other group of people, and by that he meant they derive their income by getting labor out of the other group of people.
Now the fact that the rich extract labor from the poor ties them together in a particular way, which is that the poor are poor because of what the rich are doing to them. And the rich are rich because of what they’re doing to the poor. So think of what that means is if you want the working people to improve their situation — get higher wages, better working conditions, better housing. To get all those things they have to figure out how to get more out of their employers, because that’s where the money’s coming from.
Meanwhile, the employers, in order to make a profit, have to try to give out as little as possible to their employees. And the reason Marx came to this view of class was that, through hard experience, the labor movement found that if they wanted to try to improve the lot of their constituency, which is working people, they again and again and again came up against the resistance of the employers, of the capitalists. And through those hard lessons came a concept of class in which class isn’t simply inequality but a kind of social relation that ties people together, so that the betterment of one comes at the expense of the other. That’s called exploitation.
Out of that comes the third component, which is that if you want the majority of people in capitalism — who are workers — if you want them to have better lives, it means figuring out ways to overcome the resistance and the denial of these things from their employers, from the Jeff Bezoses of the world. How are you going to do that? For this, Marx developed a political theory of how ordinary people can make their work situation better, and that’s through organizing themselves as a class. How do they do that? They find what they have in common, which is their economic situation, they find what separates them from the other side, which is that the other side is exploiting them, and they try to create organizations and institutions that will better enable them to fight against their employers. That process of creating the organizations, of using them to fight, of changing the power balance between the rich and the poor is called class struggle.
Now, these three ideas are what Marx was fundamentally committed to and what the entirety of the Marxist tradition has tried to explain and develop: that class is the foundation of modern society; class is kept in place through the process of exploitation; and that in order to overcome it and build a better society, or even build a better capitalism, you’ve got to organize people as a class — not as a race, not as genders, but as a class, because race and gender are not the same thing as class.
Melissa Naschek
So what you’re saying is that you can’t really be a Marxist unless you’re centering social class.
Vivek Chibber
That’s right. And here’s the irony and profound tragedy of today’s left. The identifying feature of Marxism, the centrality of class, is what the current left views as a crime or a sign of stupidity. Unless you abide by the centrality of class, you can’t be a Marxist. Indeed, in my view, you can’t even be a socialist. It is something of a disgrace that this has to be debated.
Now, Marx built upon this a certain political economy or an economic theory, which is called his labor theory of value, in which he tried to show how it is that capitalists pump labor out of workers; how it is that wages are determined; how it is that prices in capitalism are determined; and how capitalists as a class share in the surplus that they extract from labor, and thus have a collective interest, a common interest, in getting that labor out of workers. That’s what his economic theory tried to do.
There have been many debates in Marxism about the defensibility of the labor theory of value. People with impeccable Marxist credentials have thought that the narrow version of that theory is not sustainable. Now, you might ask, “Okay, so can you be a Marxist if you think the labor theory of value is mistaken?”
My view is that what you need to have a distinctively Marxist view of the world is the view that class is fundamental, that exploitation is what class centers around, and the way out of it is through class struggle. You can maintain that view even if you don’t abide by the labor theory of value. This is just an example.
Para Marx, os capitalistas não são menos prisioneiros do mercado do que os trabalhadores.
In my view, value theory should not be one of the defining, deciding features or criteria for whether or not somebody is a Marxist. You can reasonably accept it or reject it while abiding by the underlying sociology that Marx tried to develop and Marxists have all tried to develop. If you look at the history of Marxism, you’ll find lots of disagreement — on value theory, on dialectics, on the theory of history. But all of the people who are having these debates agree that class is central, that class struggle is central, and that exploitation is what defines class.
This inductively shows you that people who regard themselves — and who were regarded by the world — as Marxists had class theory as their common core and could legitimately disagree on other things.
To my mind, this is what enables me to call myself a Marxist, even though I think, for example, the value theory might very well be mistaken; even though I have publicly criticized orthodox historical materialism as probably unsustainable (I do think a weaker version of it is sustainable, but the orthodox one is not). I also have a pretty dim view of what’s called dialectics. It’s not that it’s wrong, but it’s pretty trivial. That being the case, I think it’s perfectly consistent to have those views and still be a Marxist. People are free to disagree with that, but you’ll have a hard time if you settle on any one of these other phenomena as being central to Marxism. What you’ll find is people who you love as Marxists fail to make the grade.
Rosa Luxemburg, who was an impeccable revolutionary, abided by a theory called underconsumptionism, which held the view that capitalism suffers from chronic lack of effective demand. She was roundly criticized by Nikolai Bukharin and other Marxists on this issue, because they insisted that Marx roundly rejected underconsumptionism. Okay, which of those is then the acceptable Marxist? Would you want to excommunicate one of them?
Paul Sweezy is the greatest American Marxist of the twentieth century. He held the view that capitalism entered a stage of what’s called monopoly capital. Now, if you hold to the view that competition is over and firms can monopolize sectors and effectively deter entrants, you also hold to the view that capital cannot move in and out of sectors pursuing the highest rate of profit. This means, technically speaking, that the law of value has ceased to hold. If you think the law of value is central to the labor theory of value, then you’re saying someone like Sweezy or Hilferding or Vladimir Lenin is no longer a Marxist. Would you want to say that? It just makes no sense.
So I think having very narrow understandings of this goes against both the history of what Marxism has been and the spirit of it. I prefer to take a more capacious view of it, but I think holding to the centrality of class still gives Marxism a recognizable foundation that makes it distinctive from other theories and which gives it, I think, the possibility of being also falsifiable. And that’s what you want a theory to be.
Marxism After Marx
Melissa Naschek
How did those important twentieth century Marxists start to build upon and in ways change the original ideas that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed in the 1800s?
Vivek Chibber
I think all of them took to heart this idea that we have to understand that the fundamental problem for social justice is capitalism, and therefore we have to understand how that economic system works. And because Marx’s works did not leave answers to everything, they had to try to take his framework and develop it, move it into vistas which were new to the theory, and they used their ability the best they could. And they did it at a time when there was a lot of debate and discussion around these things.
They also had the confidence to say that aspects of Marx’s theory might actually be mistaken. Rosa Luxemburg said quite clearly that Marx was mistaken in how he developed the schemes of reproduction in volume II of Capital, and that she was going to try to correct him. There are lots of Marxists today who would faint at the idea. It’s a strange tradition in Marxism. The word “revisionist” is used as a swear word. It’s a fundamentally religious view that if you revise a theory, you’re to be excommunicated. It means that you are dead set against the idea that it’s a social science. The idea that you can’t revise a science means you turn it into a religion.
When you look at the real advancements or revisions within Marxism in the twentieth century, most of the really productive ones came at a time when the labor movement was very, very active, when there was a deep and lively culture within the Left, and that gave people a certain confidence that we know that the foundations of the theory are correct, but we’re also free, therefore, to think about how to make it stronger because there are also weak areas of the theory, and we should not be afraid to criticize those weak areas.
Melissa Naschek
Can you give an example of one of the debates you’re talking about?
Vivek Chibber
Yeah. The debate around Rosa Luxemburg’s understanding of imperialism or Hilferding’s understanding of imperialism — that debate was over whether or not capitalism can sustain itself on its own internal dynamics or whether it needs external sources of demand and external sources of stimulus. Someone like Luxemburg says it cannot, and she’s criticized by people who say she’s dead wrong. But they don’t criticize her by saying, “You’re going against the word of Marx, and therefore, you must be excommunicated.” There was a very healthy debate in the early 1900s on what the schemes of reproduction in volume II of Capital actually prove or do not prove.
Similarly, the debate on monopoly capital: when the New Left and that generation of economists came up in the late 1960s and early ’70s, they very effectively criticized the theory that was at the time the reigning theory in Marxist economics, handed down from Lenin. Monopoly capital theory said that competitive capitalism came to an end in the early twentieth century. And competitive capitalism had morphed into monopoly capital, which is a system in which — and here it gets fuzzy — either they said that the era of competition is over and large conglomerates now control the markets, in which case competition is largely over, or they had this — in my opinion — nonsensical argument that you have something called “monopolistic competition.” I think this is essentially an oxymoron, a bit of special pleading.
This theory of monopoly capitalism, which used to be the reigning and hegemonic theory, was very roundly criticized by an emerging generation of Marxist economists, so that, by the 1980s, it really was a very minority theory.
Is one of these sides not Marxist? Is one side Marxist and the other not? Nobody said Paul Sweezy was not a Marxist. They didn’t call him a revisionist. They said the analysis was mistaken, and Sweezy said the same thing about them. I think that’s perfectly valid. I think you have a good debate here. Both sides agreed capitalism is the problem, that the class structure generates whatever it is that we’re analyzing, and that in order to get to a better society, you need to change the class structure. But they disagreed about the macro-dynamics of that structure, what drives it, what kind of constraints capital and labor are facing today. That’s just a healthy scientific debate.
Melissa Naschek
So we’re laughing at the idea that some treat Marxism like a religion, but why do you think it’s important that Marxism is a living, breathing, evolving thing?
Vivek Chibber
Well, the second it ceases to actually criticize itself, it dies, because reality is changing enough that simply repeating a theory from 150 years ago through rote memorization is not going to enable you to understand the forms or the particularities of capitalism today. Because even though it’s still capitalism, it is different from the nineteenth century’s capitalism. And so you need to be able to derive the consequences of the theory from a reality that is at least on the surface different from the reality of the nineteenth century. The essence of it is still the same.
A menos que você aceite a centralidade da classe, não pode ser marxista. A meu ver, não pode sequer ser socialista.
But then one has to actually show empirically that even though the phenomenal forms may look different from the nineteenth century, the underlying causal structures of the world are still the same, which are the profit motive, the competitive threat, the drive to produce for capital to go from sector to sector looking for the highest rate of return; how that then constrains the firms; how the constraints on the firms then constrain workers; and how the constraints on the workers then create the conditions in which they have to try to organize themselves. That’s what the theory tries to do.
If you cannot develop the theory into these new empirical domains and phenomena, you’re left with essentially a religion, a doctrine, which will be cool in certain subcultures of American students and academia and all that, but will have absolutely zero relevance to actually trying to engage the world as people find it.
The State of Modern Marxism
Melissa Naschek
How would you define modern Marxism?
Vivek Chibber
That’s a good question. It’s not easy to answer, because the fact is that with the decline of the labor movement and the degeneration of academic and intellectual culture, Marxism is, if not dead, on life support today.
In the last fifteen to twenty years, there just has not been a lot of work within Marxism. But if I were to lay out what has remained of that Marxist tradition, I think it’s actually, ironically — even though it’s harder to find Marxists right now in academia, in the intellectual world — the theory is a lot stronger than it was a hundred years ago.
Melissa Naschek
How so?
Vivek Chibber
The underlying economic logic of the theory has been explicated far, far more clearly than was the case in Lenin, Luxemburg, and Hilferding’s time. And I think the same can be said for the normative foundations of the theory, that is, its moral commitments, its view of justice and injustice. What kind of vision it has of a more humane society is infinitely clearer today than it was even in the 1950s.
A lot of earlier Marxists took to heart Marx’s own reluctance to develop a moral theory. Marx had this contradiction that while he denied that he was developing moral foundations, his arguments were profoundly moral. And for the first two generations after him, people in Lenin’s and Karl Kautsky’s generation parroted the same view. And it took the New Left to identify this as a contradiction.
After the horrible experiences of Stalinism and Pol Pot, it was perceived by people that we need to have a very clear understanding of what the moral lines are that we refuse to cross and what the moral foundation is on which we criticize capitalism.
So if we say that capitalists exploit labor, notice the word exploit. It’s a profoundly morally charged word. Marx didn’t simply say capitalists employ labor. He said they exploit labor. There’s no way to have a morally neutral rendering of the word exploit.
Melissa Naschek
Even outside of Marxist circles, exploit is not a positive word.
Vivek Chibber
Right. To exploit someone means to take advantage of them or to in some way treat them unfairly. If we’re using that word, we have to be clear about what makes the employment relation exploitative. So until the 1960s and ’70s, this was just not developed by Marxist philosophers, but it was by the New Left. And I think that’s been a very fruitful line of inquiry. I also think we’re much, much clearer on the theory of the state. The book that people used for a long time was Lenin’s State and Revolution, which is frankly a terrible book. It’s very badly argued. It gives no real theory of what the state is and what makes it a bourgeois state.
Melissa Naschek
Certainly not a coherent one.
Vivek Chibber
No. So there are many, many, many aspects of Marxism that I think over the last forty years have been much more soundly developed, explicated, and put on a more secure foundation than they were before. That was the last time that a generation of really talented intellectuals came to Marxism. That ceased to be the case in your lifetime and in most of my lifetime as well.
So we’re in this strange situation where I think the theory is actually on much more secure footing than it was, say, in 1960. But the way in which universities, political parties, and trade unions have developed in the past forty years has thinned out the intelligentsia on the Left. There is a left intelligentsia, but very little of it is Marxist. And most of the left intelligentsia actually calumniates the Marxist tradition and actively undermines the foundations of what the socialist movement has been about for 120 years, which is class politics.
The Many Critics of Marx
Melissa Naschek
I think it’s pretty self-explanatory why liberals and conservatives are highly critical of Marxism. If you’re not sure why, you can see any of our previous forty-nine episodes, and that will start to give you a sense. But why is it that leftists are participating in denigrating Marxism?
Vivek Chibber
It’s because they perceive correctly that at the core of Marxism is class politics and the centrality of class. And today’s left is single-mindedly dedicated to undermining class politics and to substituting for it various kinds of identity politics. And to my mind, for that reason, it doesn’t deserve to be called a left. It is the left wing of neoliberalism. It is not a left. You cannot be a leftist or a radical if you don’t put capitalism at the center of your politics. And that means putting class at the center of your politics. That has been true from the birth of the modern left. They put class at the center of their politics. It is the historical contribution of this left that it is the first one to not only question it but to violently reject it. And it’ll go down in history as a laughingstock for that reason.
Melissa Naschek
Well I hope one day I can laugh about it. There are a lot of different criticisms that leftists in particular levy at Marxism. One of them that I wanted to bring up is this criticism that Marxism is deterministic. So I want to ask you, is Marxism deterministic? And if it is, is that a bad thing?
Vivek Chibber
Of course it’s deterministic. And not only is that okay, it’s actually essential to any viable social theory, because social theories are essentially about causation. That’s what social theories do. You try to understand what brings about something else. And then you try to make a generalization about it, that in certain circumstances, when you have A, you will also have B. That’s what theories do.
Marxism says that as long as you have capitalist class structures, you’re going to have certain kinds of social outcomes. Those social outcomes are exploitation, all kinds of injustices, all kinds of unfair outcomes. That is a deterministic statement. Now, that’s what I call a macro-level determinism. But a society that is capitalist is going to have certain kinds of institutions and certain kinds of social outcomes. That also means that it’s true at a micro level.
If you’re working in a factory, if you’re working in a restaurant, Marxists say the employment relation is going to generate certain kinds of behaviors even at that place, not just society as a whole. And that’s why if you’re trying to organize people in an Amazon warehouse, if you’re trying to organize people in transportation at UPS, that’s one firm or one warehouse. Those are places where the same kinds of class interests and class processes are going to be found, which you theorize at a macro level.
Melissa Naschek
That gets back to the beginning of our conversation, where we talked about this idea of actors being compelled by social relations.
Vivek Chibber
Now, it is a fact that as you go from macro to micro, it becomes less deterministic. Because once you get down to the level of the individual, people can be willing to undertake all sorts of sacrifices, go against their class interests, go against the compulsions. But we also know that those people are unusual. And that’s why as you aggregate across individuals, the predictive success of the theory increases.
But that is not to say that it has no predictive purchase at the micro level either. If that were the case, you’d be in this weird situation of saying, “The macro laws of capitalism are deterministic, but look, man, if you’re trying to organize your shop or union, that’s not going to work because that’s micro level.” That really doesn’t make any sense. It does make sense to say that it’s less deterministic at the micro level, but it’s still highly probabilistic.
Coming out of identity politics, people love to talk about contingency. But if the world is ruled by contingency, then why do you object to racism? Why do you object to patriarchy? If you’re saying that patriarchal social relations generate injustice of their own kind, what you’ve rejected is a Marxist determinism, but you’ve accepted another one in its place. So it’s a kind of a rhetorical ploy that’s been developed out of this so-called radical intelligentsia.
The truth is anybody who has an actual identifiable social program, anybody who has a social theory of justice and injustice that links injustices to social institutions and social structures, they are abiding by some degree of causal determinism, or at the very least a highly probabilistic theory that’s no more and no less deterministic than class theory. What they’re doing when they object to Marxism isn’t really objecting to determinism. They’re just objecting to class being the explanatory thing. And as I said, this is the calling card of the contemporary left.
Melissa Naschek
Which is also a really disingenuous way to attack another idea. Why not just say, “Well, I object to the idea that class is what’s the fundamental determinant?” Why not say, “I actually believe this other thing?”
Vivek Chibber
Yeah. It’s part of the general confusion that’s set in in the last thirty years in social theory.
Look, if capitalism doesn’t have any deterministic properties, why are you anti-capitalist? Why do you oppose capitalism if you don’t think capitalism is causally responsible for the injustices that you’re trying to overturn?
You cannot call yourself anti-capitalist unless you think it has very strong identifiable and highly probabilistic causal properties. That’s the same if you’re a feminist, if you’re anti-racist, the same thing goes. You cannot be a “social justice warrior” and be a promoter of contingency.
Marxism’s Decline
Melissa Naschek
You said Marxism is on life support. And yet we were talking about how in the twentieth century it was flourishing and developing and growing. What happened in between?
Vivek Chibber
Well, it wasn’t flourishing throughout the twentieth century. There are really two periods in which you see Marxist theory actually developing in a serious way. One was a couple of decades after, say, the first Russian revolution of 1905, from 1905 to, say, the early 1930s, after which it goes into actual decline. And then it revives in the mid- to late 1960s into the middle of the ’80s or so, and then it goes into slow decline. And then by 2015, it’s in free fall. Why? If you just think about it for a second, it’s pretty obvious.
Marxism is a social theory, and it requires serious study, serious thought, serious analysis. So it’s a body of ideas that tends to be housed among either professional academics, or we might say intellectuals at one remove from everyday organizing. So even people like Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Luxemburg, they’re very deep in politics at their time, but most of their actual time is spent reading, writing, and in meetings — not on the shop floor, not doing the organizing.
A simples repetição de uma teoria de há 150 anos não nos permitirá compreender as particularidades do capitalismo de hoje.
There was a conveyor belt that links them to the organizers, and they’re imbued with that culture, but they’re not themselves shop-floor organizers. Then there’s people at that time, like György Lukács or Karl Korsch, who are mostly just intellectuals. All of these people have one thing in common: they spend a lot of their time reading, thinking, studying, debating. Some of them are in universities, others are not in universities, but they’re also institutionally separate from everyday activism.
In the 1960s too, you had people who were either in communist parties, or in research institutions around trade unions, or for the first time ever in universities. The ’60s and ’70s is the first time Marxism was actually anchored in universities to any great extent. In both of these periods it is developed by people who you might call professional intellectuals of some kind. That means it’s a certain class environment. These are people of middle-class backgrounds in a middle-class environment, which means that they are actually stepping out of their class culture when they’re being Marxists.
What’s making them step out of that class culture? It is an explosive growth of the labor movement. In both of these periods, in the early twentieth century, and in the 1960s and ’70s, the one thing that both have in common is major social upheavals: labor movements, anti-colonial movements, the anti-racist movement, which is mostly located in the working class, the black and brown working class. And then this was the last time you had any kind of explosion of labor activism inside the advanced capitalist world.
What that did is that it pulled middle-class intellectuals and academics out of their normal class environment, and it kind of civilized them. It imbued them with a kind of humanity, which academics don’t normally have. Academics are basically just glorified clerks. They’re basically paper pushers who go about publishing meaningless articles, stuff that nobody’s ever going to read, for promotion and upward mobility, without any real thought as to how it connects to the world around them.
Melissa Naschek
That strikes me in particular as something that’s always drawn me to Marxism. That quote, the point of theory is not to explain the world but to change it. That it’s a theory that’s not just meant to put forward ideas in the abstract but to actually provide organizers with information that they can use. This may sound self-explanatory, but actually the majority of theory does not concern itself with this.
Vivek Chibber
No, and there’s no particular reward in academia for doing socially relevant work. So most academics and journalists are in this middle-class milieu, and their fundamental motivation is upward advancement, just like it is for somebody in an insurance company or real estate agency or something like that.
What these two periods had in common, though, was that because they were periods of social upheaval, a lot of middle-class people were drawn outside their normal class culture toward the world, and were then — if they were lucky enough to be in political organizations or around political organizations like communist parties, trade unions, and socialist parties — also disciplined by the culture of those institutions to try to make their ideas relevant to the world. And that gave them the motivation to really interrogate those ideas, to really think hard about them. And there’s enough of them around each other that they could push each other, they could hold each other accountable. And finally, because there were so many Marxist thinkers, it became kind of mainstream.
Most intellectuals and academics today stay away from Marxism for two reasons. One is that it doesn’t really help their careers, and the other is it’s embarrassing. You feel like you’re the freak, and unless you have real self-confidence, unless you have a community around you, or unless you are in an organization or something like that, it’s hard to be the freak in the room. So you slowly get assimilated, and it pays because there’s better academic career advancement if you’re not a Marxist.
So those were the two periods in which you saw enormous flourishing of Marxist theory for all of these reasons. When the labor movements ebb, when the political institutions and trade unions and parties are dismantled, the academics are absorbed back into their world of upward advancement and general contempt toward working people, which is what most middle-class people have, right? So in the 1940s, the 1950s, and the 1960s, this is what you see. And then by the 1990s onward, the same thing again.
By the 1990s, academic and intellectual institutions were different from what they were in the 1950s, in that they were no longer totally dominated by white men. Now you also have women, and now you also have people of color in these institutions, and they now start finding that they are not given all the goodies that the white men were getting, and they start developing a social theory and social analyses fundamentally geared toward their experience of discrimination, of glass ceilings, etc. And that then became the new radicalism.
The new radicalism was one where the greatest sin is not exploitation. It’s not the way in which the poor are ground into dust. The greatest sin became discrimination, or cultural appropriation, or of not being treated with the same kind of respect that somebody else is in these middle-class settings. And anybody who tries to bring class into this environment, into this analysis, tries to redirect attention toward the people who can’t make basic ends meet and don’t have social insurance or basic employment. That is a threat to this version of radicalism, which is firmly pointed single-mindedly toward the travails of the professional classes whose upward mobility and ambitions are being frustrated. That becomes now the new radicalism.
The irony of this turn away from class is not that it promoted race or gender above class. It’s that it identified race and gender with a certain class constituency within those communities. So it’s not that, for example, anti-racism should be denigrated in favor of class politics. It’s that identity politics turned race politics into the worldview of wealthy black and brown people, of the professional classes and the business classes within the black community, within Latino and Asian communities.
Melissa Naschek
E seus interesses de classe específicos.
Vivek Chibber
O marxismo sempre foi antirracista. Sempre. O marxismo sempre combateu as relações de gênero patriarcais. Mas ele as conceituava e abordava de uma maneira que colocava em primeiro plano e promovia os interesses de pessoas de cor e mulheres pertencentes à classe trabalhadora. Isso significa que se tratava de uma perspectiva de classe sobre as identidades sociais.
O que a política de identidade fez foi reduzir raça, gênero e sexualidade à forma como essas questões eram vivenciadas por profissionais em ascensão social — tanto na academia quanto nas chamadas classes profissionais. Portanto, não se trata de ter substituído classe por raça. O que ocorreu foi a introdução de uma versão de raça que interessa apenas às elites. Introduziu-se uma versão de política de gênero que interessa apenas a mulheres profissionais e mulheres ricas. E isso significa que, para combater de fato e com mais eficácia a opressão de raça e gênero, é preciso abordá-las da maneira como a classe trabalhadora as vivencia. E a discriminação é apenas um pequeno componente daquilo que essas pessoas vivenciam.
Para as populações oprimidas — seja você mulher, pessoa de cor ou integrante de qualquer outro grupo —, a luta fundamental continua sendo por moradia, assistência médica, empregos, creches e coisas do gênero; questões que, para as classes profissionais, nunca foram problemas, pois elas já dispõem de tudo isso. Assim, elas concentram-se obsessivamente nos obstáculos a uma maior ascensão social, em vez de focarem em como a sua situação de classe, na verdade, agrava a sua situação de gênero e raça em comparação com aqueles que estão em ascensão social.
Isso não ocorria nas décadas de 1950 e 1960 — e não poderia ocorrer —, pois essas pessoas estavam sistematicamente excluídas de tais instituições sociais. É por isso que, hoje, o radicalismo não só é amplamente inútil para os trabalhadores, como estes também desprezam os radicais; afinal, os radicais passam a maior parte do tempo destilando desprezo pelas "massas ignaras" e querem manter a atenção voltada exclusivamente para as agruras daquilo que chamamos de classe profissional-gerencial. Essa é a essência da política de identidade. O que torna isso uma novidade hoje é o fato de ter ocupado o espaço de análise radical que antes pertencia a socialistas e marxistas. Enquanto essa forma de radicalismo for a que vemos na esquerda, a esquerda continuará sendo marginal, inútil e amplamente desprezada.
Colaborador
Vivek Chibber é professor de sociologia na Universidade de Nova York. Ele é editor da Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.
Melissa Naschek é membro da Democratic Socialists of America (Socialistas Democráticos da América).
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